Hacker News Reader

The main takeaway:

Engineers prioritizing making systems easier and more consistent end up with overly complex, difficult to operate systems

Product managers prioritize shipping features and end up making the software development process slower

Security prioritizes minimizing risk of change and ends up maximizing the risk of out-of-date software.

Flat organizations prioritize open communication and end up with cliques and internal politics.

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Most of the ills in this article would be fixed by better product management that has earned clout with senior management. For example, the product manager should be able to tell everyone what most likely constitutes a minimum viable product (MVP), and be able to defend that against, for example sales-driven feature creep. And on the other hand, product management should be able to communicate to engineering the value of time-to-market. If your product manager is unable to do this and is just tallying feature requests and trying to cram in as much as possible you are screwed in multiple dimensions.

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